National Libraries Day Silver Serpent Cup Event - Beeston Library, Saturday 6th February 2016

Saturday 6th February 2016 is National Libraries Day!

The aim of the day is to encourage people to use their local libraries and find out about the services they have to offer. There are events going on in libraries all over the United Kingdom. You can find out if there's an event in a library near you using the map on the National Libraries Day web site.

This year, I'm delighted to be doing another event at my local library in Beeston, Nottingham. I'll be reading my picture book Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup and explaining how illustrator Ed Eaves and I came to create it.

Here's a trailer for book.

And you will get the chance to design and make your own pick-and-mix Silver Serpent racer model.

TICKETS ARE FREE and available from the library, but there are a limited number so please request them in advance. The event is suitable for children aged four to eight. 

EVENT DETAILS

Saturday 6th February

2.00 pm - 3.00 pm

Beeston Library 


Foster Avenue

Beeston

Nottingham

NG9 1AE

Tel: 0115 925 5168/5084

email: beeston.library@nottscc.gov.uk

 

Visit my web site to find out more about THE SILVER SERPENT CUP 

Visit the National Libraries Day web site

CALLUM'S INCREDIBLE CONSTRUCTION KIT • Edinburgh Event and Flick-Flack

I’ve just got back from the Edinburgh International Book Festival where I did an event previewing my forthcoming picture book Callum’s Incredible Construction Kit illustrated by Ben Mantle. Although I’ve been to Edinburgh at festival time before, this was my first time at the Book Festival, as either a visitor or a participant, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

As well as reading the book, I talked about my lifelong love of building things and how this has influenced many of my stories. Edinburgh proved to be an ideal place to launch a book about a boy called Callum (a Scottish name meaning dove) and I met two Callums at the signing afterwards. Thanks to them and everyone else that came along.

Callum’s Incredible Construction Kit is published
by Egmont and their Publishing Director, Melissa
Fairley, came along to lend a hand at the event. 

All of the children attending took away a Callum Flick-Flack, an intriguing piece of paper-engineering I’d created especially as a souvenir of the event.
Having spent some time designing it, I thought I should share it with a wider audience, so you can click here to download a smaller print out and make version of the Flick-Flack then watch the video below for detailed instructions on how to make it.

Click here to find out more about Callum's Incredible Construction Kit.

“I call this game fun in a box,” said the Cat.

It’s often said that when you give a child a toy, they may spend more time playing with the box it came in than with the toy itself. This goes double if there is a paper-engineer in the family and when our kids were little, large cardboard boxes were seldom discarded — they were put aside for the next birthday party when they would be cut and folded into …

… a pirate ship … 

… a dinosaur … 

… a dragon …  

 

… or a castle gateway. 

In our family, a party is not a party without some creative use of cardboard. 

Perhaps that explains why my son Max — presumably thinking that being six foot three at the age of fifteen did not make him conspicuous enough — decided to attend his school prom dressed in a cardboard top hat and tails.

So while other students were fussing with their dinner jackets and ball gowns, I was helping Max package himself in corrugated cardboard and parcel tape. Here is the wondrous result.

Quick Quack Duck

As a paper-engineer, I’m always on the lookout for interesting uses of pop-ups, and there has been quite a lot of animation work done in recent years using pop-ups — or at least what appear to be pop-ups.

Readers of the earlier newsletter version of the Scribble Street News may recall me writing about the title sequence for the film adaptation of Le Petit Nicolas.  Like many pop-up animations, this appears to be as much artful animation as genuine paper-engineering, and many of these animations are made entirely with computer generated imagery rather than card models.

Up to now, such animations seem to have been limited to one-off projects such as title sequences, adverts and short films.  However yesterday I met Vanessa Hill, Director of UK TV company The Foundation, who told me about Quick Quack Duck, a new children's series they are making, which takes this style to a whole new level of storytelling and enchanting visual complexity.

It will be a while before the series is on our screens, but you can get a taste of how it will look from the trailer below.

And here's the award-winning short film The Happy Ducklng, directed by Gili Dolev, from which the series hatched.